She. Yes. We women say we love the spirit of the man we have chosen, but it is a spirit that acts and expresses itself in the body. To that body, with all its habits, so unconscious! its sure force and power, we are bound—more than the man is bound to the loveliness of the woman he adores. We—I, it is safer so, perhaps—understand what I see, what I feel, what I touch, what I have kissed and loved. That is mine and becomes mine more each day I live with it and possess it. That love of the concrete is our limitation, so we are told, but it is our joy.
He. So we should sit, without words, for we would shrink from speech as too sad, and we should know swiftly the thought of the other. And when the sense of our loss became quite intolerable, we should walk on silently, in a growing horror of the eternity ahead. At last one of us, moved by some acute remembrance of our deadened selves, would go to the Master of the Spirits and, standing before him in rebellion, would say: "Cast us out as unfit for this heaven, and if Thou canst not restore us into that past state at least give us Hell, where we may suffer a common pain, instead of this passive calm and contemplation."
THE MEASURE OF JOY IN LIFE.
She. Yet, how short it will be! How awful to have the days and weeks and months slip by, and know that at the best there is only a reprieve of a few years. I think from this night I shall have my shadow of death. I shall always be doing things for the last time; a sad life that! And perhaps we change; as you say, we may become dead in life, prepared for a different state; and in that change we may find a new joy—a longing for perfection and peace.
He. That would be an acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is the sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we cry—there is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We look to another world where all that will be made right, and where we shall suffer no more.
Let the others have their opiate. You, at least, I think, are too brave for that kind of comfort. Does it not seem a little grasping to ask for eternity, because we have fifty years of action? And an eternity of passivity, because we have not done well with action? No, the world has had too much of that coddling, that kind of shuffle through, as if it were a way station where we must spend the night and make the best of sorry accommodations. Our benevolence, our warmheartedness, goes overmuch to making the beds a bit better, especially for the feeble and the sick and old, and those who come badly fitted out. We help the unfortunate to slide through: I think it would be more sensible to make it worth their while to stay. The great philanthropists are those who ennoble life, and make it a valuable possession. It would be well to poison the forlorn, hurry them post haste to some other world where they may find the conditions better suited. Then give their lot of misery and opportunity to another who can find joy in his burden.
She. A world without mercy would be hard—it would be full of a strident clamor like a city street.
He. Mercy for all; no favoritism for a few. Whoever could find a new joy, a lasting activity; whoever could keep his body and mind in full health and could show what a tremendous reality it is to live—would be the merciful man. There would be less of that leprosy, death in life, and the last problem of death itself would not be insurmountable.
So I think the common men who know things, concrete things,—the price of grain, if you will; the men of affairs who have their minds on the struggle; the artists who in paint or words explore new possibilities—all these are the merciful men, the true comforters whom we should honor. They make life precious—aside from its physical value.
You know the keen movement that runs through your whole being when you come face to face with some great Rembrandt portrait. How much the man knew who made it, who saw it unmade! Or that Bellini's Pope we used to watch, whose penetrating smile taught us about life. And the greater Titian, the man with a glove, that looks at you like a live soul, one whom a man created to live for the joy of other men. In another form, I feel the same gift of life in a new enterprise: a railroad carried through; a corrupt government cleaned for the day. And, again, that Giorgione at Paris, where the men and women are doing nothing in particular, but living in the sunlight, a joyful, pagan band.